Use the browser you want, when you want, with Browsium Catalyst

A few months back, we discussed different ways to skirt Internet Explorer 6 compatibility issues at work without leaving your systems wide open to malware attacks. One of our solutions from that article was Browsium Ion, which can apply different filters to your busted websites so that newer Internet Explorer versions can open sites intended for IE 6.

This solution can help IT shops still stuck with Internet Explorer 6 (and, thus, Windows XP) move to newer browser versions and operating systems, but what about shops that want to use Internet Explorer for certain internal sites, but an alternative browser like Firefox or Chrome for general browsing? What about when IT standardizes on one browser, but users demand another (or worse, install one themselves)?

Browsium wants to reduce technical and user education-related headaches for these use cases. Its new Catalyst tool, currently in a public beta, gives IT managers a console through which they can control what browsers open which websites for every computer on their network. Browsium President and COO Gary Schare took some time to walk us through the product's features and explain just how it would help out businesses that can't get away from their legacy websites.

What it does

Schare sees Catalyst as being complementary to Ion, Browsium's current flagship product. To recap, Ion allows administrators to take old websites that worked in older versions of Internet Explorer and "remediate" them to render properly in Internet Explorer 8 or 9. The product is primarily intended to allow businesses stuck with aging Web apps to upgrade their Windows XP installations to more modern versions of Windows—other solutions to this problem exist, but Ion arguably requires the least amount of work and infrastructure, especially compared to virtualization-based solutions.

Once old sites have been remediated with Ion, Browsium is now pushing Catalyst as a way to overcome a user education hurdle that I became all too familiar with in my days in IT: users calling the help desk when a site they were trying to use wouldn't work in their browser of choice, redirecting them to Internet Explorer.

To work, Catalyst requires a small piece of client software (in the form of a browser add-on) to be installed on each of your systems either manually or through a software deployment tool like Active Directory or SCCM. Once you've done that, an administrator can begin creating rules for how computers handle certain URLs—specific URLs or even entire domains can be set to open automatically in a particular browser when the user tries to navigate to them.

Catalyst will also allow you to use a whitelist to protect older, insecure browsers from the dangers of the wider Internet. If you want certain internal websites to open in Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 8, but absolutely do not want your users using the browser for anything else, you can easily block sites according to URL or security zone. That removes the risk that your users will unwittingly infect their computers by failing to switch back to a modern browser after they log out of their business app.

The best part of Catalyst is probably how thorough it is. If you set the google.com site to open only in Google Chrome, it will open in Chrome no matter what. Catalyst will seamlessly open up the appropriate browser without interrupting the user or throwing any pop-up windows in their face.

Enlarge/ Setting up a URL-based rule to open a site in Internet Explorer.

Schare pointed out that Catalyst is a good way for businesses to avoid zero-day exploits—administrators can simply restrict or disable browsing from the affected product while they wait for the patch to be released, rather than waiting for the patch and crossing their fingers.

For now, the Catalyst software supports Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and 9; Mozilla Firefox 15 or later (notably, not Mozilla's well-intentioned but seldom-used ESR); and Google Chrome 22 or later. Support for additional browsers should be easy enough to add, but these three are overwhelmingly the most popular options on Windows. The final version of the software should be ready in early 2013, and while pricing information for Catalyst isn't yet available, like Ion it will be sold on a per-seat basis—individuals are certainly welcome to use the software, but they aren't the intended audience at this time.

Support for Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is also planned for both Catalyst and Ion, but isn't available just yet—according the Schare, Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 will be a higher priority than Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8. Windows Vista is absent from the support list, but given Catalyst's intended audience, that isn't likely to cause much of a problem.

Whether you find Catalyst worthwhile or not will depend almost entirely on how much your business depends on applications that will only work in Internet Explorer—if you don't have any such apps and keep all of your browsers up-to-date, there's not much here for you. Catalyst is good at what it does, but by design it's a bit of a one-trick pony.

What Catalyst can enable, especially when taken together with Ion, is a loosening of strict IT-enforced browser restrictions that define so many corporate computing environments. With Catalyst, IT can mandate that Internet Explorer be used for internal sites, but allow users to use their browser of choice for the rest of the Web, something that should help to alleviate headaches on both sides.

9 Reader Comments

Sounds pretty cool. Now if they could wrap the different browser engines so that they can live side-by-side in a single tabbed interface instead of having multiple windows open the whole experience could be seamless to the end user.

Sounds pretty cool. Now if they could wrap the different browser engines so that they can live side-by-side in a single tabbed interface instead of having multiple windows open the whole experience could be seamless to the end user.

Actaully I think what you're suggesting is the minimum needed to achieve their goal of being seamless. Throwing up a new browser X window on top of browser Y when I enter a URL into the latter sounds highly jarring. Opening the URL as a new tab in an existing browser X session on a different monitor would if anything be worse.

IEtab already lets you embed IE in FF; presumably a ChromeTab could be build for FF the same way. In IE you could probably build FF/Chrome tabs as activeX controls (signed so IE doesn't throw security warnings). Could something similar be done for Chrome, or does it's less wideopen plugin architecture make it impossible?

Seems to me this software encourages corporate laziness and slashing the software maintenance budget even further. Your IE6 apps don't work because you haven't paid anyone to upgrade them in the last ten years. Many companies always think they can save money by laying off or reassigning the folks that developed these applications they're so reliant on after initial development is finished. A few years ago, I was working at a company that mission critical software they developed in Access '97. In order to keep the thing running, we had a special Windows 2000 machine dedicated to this software and we prayed we never had a machine failure.

Seems to me this software encourages corporate laziness and slashing the software maintenance budget even further. Your IE6 apps don't work because you haven't paid anyone to upgrade them in the last ten years. Many companies always think they can save money by laying off or reassigning the folks that developed these applications they're so reliant on after initial development is finished.

This is a rather limited perspective: I know for a fact that there are many, many companies who have software deployed internally that was developed by external partners who no longer exist.

It's a bit harsh to say they are lazy when they don't necessarily have the ability to make the change!

On the other hand, I think it's perfectly reasonable to demand a maintenance solution in all vendor contracts, including a source code escrow requirement if the application will become a critical part of the business. And the failure to do that was a bit short sighted for some of these businesses.

Rarely do I find an article on ArsTechnica that sounds like a press release, but this one did (albeit a well-researched piece based on a press release). Are there competing products? (If so, mention them!) Is there something innovative about Browsium's approach? (If so, describe how it differs from competitors.) I had no beef with the article content, it's just the appearance of product-boosting that made me nervous and I thought I'd share my concern.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.